What is the Global Warming Diet?

How do our food choices affect global warming? That's what this website and project, named after the original title of the book, The Global Warming Diet, Cool Recipes for a Hot Planet, set out to discover.

"D-I-E-T is a four-letter word. No one likes diets. Diet foods are boring, flavorless, and unsatisfying— words that describe the global-warming diet to a tee. It’s a machine-cuisine we are eating today, and it takes about 500 gallons (1,890 l) of oil per person each year to produce it. Talk about a greasy spoon—we emit similar amounts of carbon dioxide eating as we do by driving. U. S. government research shows that our chemical fertilizer and herbicide-based food system contributes close to 20 percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions."

So how do food choices affect global warming? What’s on the menu of the Global Warming Diet?

Mountains of meat, especially beef. It takes more than ten times the fossil fuels to produce a calorie of beef protein than a calorie of grain protein.

Large amounts of imported food and drink.

Foods grown with massive amounts of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. We use 22 billion pounds (10 billion kg) of fertilizer just to grow the grain to feed our livestock.

A cornucopia of processed, frozen, and prepared foods. Processed food makes up three-quarters of global food sales by price (not by quantity) and typically requires more energy to make than what we get back when we eat it.

Piles of bottled water. More than half of all Americans drink bottled water; about a third of the public consumes it regularly. It takes approximately 17 million barrels of oil just to make the plastic for the 29-plus billion plastic water bottles used in the United States each year.

Gobs of high-fructose corn syrup. In 2000, Americans ate an average of thirty-one teaspoons of sugar a day, more than 15 percent of their caloric intake. much of that was in drinks with added high-fructose corn syrup. The average American consumed almost 41.5 pounds (18.8 kg) of corn syrup in 2006, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Sizeable amounts of food waste. Nearly half of all the food harvested in the United States goes to waste each year. Our food system generates 3,774 Calories per person every day, but we consume only approximately 2,100 Calories; the rest is wasted by overeating or by just throwing it away.

Plenty of packaging waste. We throw away 98 percent of the 380 billion plastic bags we use each year, along with the 12 million barrels of oil it takes to produce them.